


Run Rabbit Run

by Oatsotas



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Changing Tenses, Memories, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rabbits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-06 14:54:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15197186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oatsotas/pseuds/Oatsotas
Summary: Himiko was six when she first saw a rabbit pulled from a hat and begged her mom to help her learn the trick.She never knew that one day she'd be the rabbit.





	Run Rabbit Run

Himiko went to a magic show when she was six. Fingers sticky with cotton candy twined in her hair as she watched the man on stage remove the top hat from his head, stick his hand in, then pull a rabbit from it. She had squealed and tugged on her mother's hand.

After the show, she escaped from her parents and found the magician, asked him how he got the rabbit in there.

He'd just smiled and reminded her that a magician never reveals his secrets.

 

-

 

Her muscles ache and she can feel blood running down the side of her face. She wants to press her hat to stop the bleeding but she can't let go of Shuichi's hand. The glass around them creates a dangerous maze. One wrong step and she'll cut her paw.

She has a paw because she's a rabbit. She had been a rabbit in a hat, but Keebo blew that hat to pieces.

Now, as she looks to the edge of the cage, the brim of the hat, she sees the hand. It has so many fingers. Some are lanky and thin, others short and stocky. Most fall in between. One has hair that seems to touch the ground. They approach, tentative.

The rabbit bit and now it needs to be put down.

 

-

 

When Himiko was twelve there was a street corner magician performing for change. The magician removed her top hat with a twirl. In one smooth motion, a rabbit appears from her hat, kicking its hind legs in her arms.

Himiko's mouth twists into a scowl. How cruel. How long had that rabbit been in there? Or worse, how long had that rabbit been stuffed into a hidden compartment, alone and in the dark until it was needed? Maybe she doesn't want to be a magician, doesn't want to watch them again. She could never watch something that inhumane.

Her phoned dinged, signalling that the new episode of Danganronpa was live.

 

-

 

The rabbit is returned to its cage at the end of the year. Six months in a hospital - or vet's clinic, as it is -  sponsored by Team Danganronpa with the best therapists and best doctors and best smiles and best manicures for the best hands that reach for her constantly. Himiko had spent most of her time there huddled on her bed in her room with the lights off. Alone in the dark until she was needed.

But now she's home. Rather, the place her owners (strike through) parents say is her home. It's not a metal cage but it might as well be. She can see her parents concerned looks in her periphery, wishes she had her hat so she couldn't. 

What it's like, she wants to ask them. More specifically she wants to ask her mother what it's like to give birth to a rabbit, a rabbit that's doomed to be hauled by the neck over and over for the entertainment of the audience? How could her mother let the little rabbit go like that?

Then again, it was her mother's idea to take her to that magic show.

 

-

 

The magic shop appealed to fourteen year old Himiko in a way that she felt ashamed of. Ashamed because of an interest in something so juvenile. Ashamed because she remembered the rabbit kicking as it was pulled from a hat.

But it was in that magic shop that she saw the trick. The fake rabbit with spring-loaded hind legs that kicked when its tummy was squeezed. A hat with a compartment in the top. Or a wide sleeve that can hide white fuzz.

She had bought all of them with the money from doing chores around the house. Her friends had laughed, but still humored her when she finally got the trick down. She did it over and over until a spring from the rabbit shot out from its place and embedded itself in her bedroom wall.

Her parents wouldn't let her have another one.

 

-

 

Her parents won't let her out of the cage. She's too delicate, they say, still recovering. She needs rest and time away from the world, they chide. Every other day or so she tries to escape via the front door, but there's always another lock on the cage. Today it's a camera that her dad watches from his office.

She doesn't protest when he walks her back to her room, ignores the click of the lock on the door, pretends she's just a stupid bunny who doesn't understand human voices as she listens to her parents argue. It's funny, really. She pretends to be stupid, but it's her parents who are foolish and dumb.

See, they haven't realized that Himiko isn't a rabbit. Not really. Himiko Yumeno, Survivor of Danganronpa Season 53 is a rabbit. A cute little thing that was yanked from her hat over and over to the delight of millions.

But it was all fake, just like her. She's nothing but a mechanical toy to be shoved away until needed. Until the next press conference or interview or whatever excuse they have to let her out of the cage.

The cage, the cage, the cage, how ridiculous to keep a fake rabbit in a cage.

Himiko kicks her legs. A child having a fit, a fake rabbit with a defective spring.

 

-

 

A friend was in the hospital when Himiko bought another rabbit. A better one, more reliable, more lifelike. The two talked for hours while waiting for the results. Himiko had begun stroking the rabbit, her friend laughed.

"It's not real. You don't need to pet it."

"Whoops…"

More laughter. The way the rabbit sat, how deep and detailed the ceramic eyes were, it all added to that wonderful illusions magicians crave. It became easy to forget it wasn't real.

A few times Himiko had woken up - prior to this hospital visit - convinced that her pet rabbit had escaped its cage. But there's no way that could be true because fake rabbits don't come to life.

"What if fake rabbits are just dead rabbits?" Her friend had asked.

"Don't say weird stuff like that."

But from then on, Himiko only saw the rabbit as formerly real, as something that had lived and breathed. When she squeezed its stomach, she imagined it frolicking. Once. Never again.

Just like her friend. The diagnosis was grave. Something incomprehensible that Himiko could never pronounce.

Within a week, her friend was dead and her blood stained the rabbit.

 

-

 

Himiko's parents aren't home when she decides to take a walk. She's forgotten her neighborhood, but that's okay. Walking so aimlessly, so lost, it makes her feel like a real rabbit. Perhaps she should hop out in front of an oncoming car, get scared, then try to turn around only to get run over. She might be fake, but she can break like a real rabbit.

A car turns the corner. She steps off the curb, then remembers that it's not rabbits that do that, but squirrels, so she pulls her foot back in and the car passes by.

She keeps going on her walk, deciding that she could never be a squirrel. Squirrels like nuts far more than she does. Then again, she doesn't particularly like lettuce or carrots either.

But she's not really a rabbit anyway.

Another car. Another chance. But she's not a squirrel, so she just keeps walking. To where? She doesn't particularly know.

Do rabbits know where they're going? They have to. How else do they find their babies or their food or their homes?

Home. She's suddenly home. Not at her parents' house; that's a cage, after all. No, she's home beneath a bush, peeking out as the world passes by. There's a garden in front of her full of delicious veggies. However, as soon as she leaves her little nest to eat some, a hand snatches her scruff and she's back in hat, back in the cage.

Himiko later hears that someone found her passed out in a bush after walking for nearly thirteen hours.

Her paws hurt. Her door has another lock on it. She lays in bed, still as a fake rabbit.

 

-

 

Therapists called it trauma, bullies said she should get over it, a priest said it was God's plan. Whatever it was called, it had possessed sixteen year old Himiko to collect fake rabbits.

Her room, coated in everything rabbit, from wooden carvings to wallpaper to intricate drawings, became her sanctuary. Her favorite rabbit, the one she'd held in the hospital, she named after her friend,-

… 

Her friend… Her friend… 

She cradled the rabbit

 

-

 

The room is almost empty now. Her parents probably threw out everything. Apparently her rabbit obsession had gotten out of hand. Well, they didn't throw out one.

Himiko turns the fake rabbit from the hospital in her hands, its name forever lost to the machinations of Team Danganronpa.

She decides to name it Tenko. Blood spurts from its neck. She wraps bandages tight around the wound, strangles it.

She changes the name to Angie. It eyes are shiny and empty with lies. She gouges them out.

She changes the name to Korekiyo. It's a killer. She drowns it in vegetable oil, holds it above the stove. Her stops her before she can burn down the house.

The names - and the lack of names, really - bring back memories. She tries her best to vomit those memories into her father's shoes.

 

-

 

"You gonna do it?" said a boy hovering over her desk.

"Dunno…"

"You should."

The audition form for season 53 sat hidden beneath a series of math problems and readings that were so long overdue that Himiko doesn't know if the teacher even remembers assigning them.

"What would you do if you got it?"

"Dunno…"

The boy snorted, derisive and sneering. "That all you can say?"

"I dunno."

He smiled. He was a friend. Jabbed a finger at her. "You know what you should be? Ultimate Rabbit Tamer. Or carrot eater."

Himiko stopped munching on a carrot and glared at him. "Nah," she had said. "Wanna be the Ultimate Magician."

"So you're gonna do it?"

"Dunno."

 

-

 

She hasn't seen Shuichi or Maki since they left the hospital. Well, technically she's  _ seen  _ them, stared at their photos on her phone for so very long.

One day she's sitting in her cage, chewing on pellets on her bed of hay when her mother slides a sealed envelope between the slats. Between locks four and five. It's a letter from Team Danganronpa.

However, when she opens it, not only is she surprised that she can read it (maybe she make some money being the world's first reading fake rabbit), but that it's actually from Shuichi. In it, he details how he managed to slip a letter in the mail and make it look like it was from the studio. A fascinating little story really, and funny. The detective becoming so clandestine.

He wants to meet. He's sent a letter to Maki as well.

Does she want that? To meet him again? And Maki?

She lies back on her hay to think about it. Then remembers. She has seen Maki before now. Through the slats of her cage, on the TV. She could also read, because that headline had said "Danganronpa 53 survivor found hanged."

How quaint.

 

-

 

She was sixteen when she was accepted to Danganronpa. Three days before her seventeenth birthday. Her dad had slid the envelope beneath her door. She'd been reading a book about medieval times and how they used to prepare rabbits.

You had to kill them, obviously, then skin them. You always preserved the skin; it could be used for a variety of clothing items. Then you bled the meat, preserving that, too. Always preserve. Always. After that you had to dessicate the skin so you could preserve the meat for as long as you need. First with salt, then with smoke.

Her mother knocked, she had been eager to hear the answer. After all, she could be sending her darling little daughter to her death.

She did, one way or another.

 

-

 

It's simple to sneak out. Her parents are careless. They think door locks will keep Himiko in when the bars on the window to her cage are so easy to unscrew. It's hard without thumbs, but the little rabbit is tenacious, if anything else.

She hikes a bit, then trades an autograph for some change to take a bus. Half of Japan crosses her eyes in the span of a blink. Rabbits don't have a very good sense of time, apparently. Fake rabbits don't have any sense of time. That's how they sit on the shelves for so long before being grabbed by some stupid kid who wants to be a mage.

When she reaches the café, she orders a coffee and leverages her autograph once more to get it for nothing. She sits for a while, staring out the window. Time passes. She knows that much. Her coffee grows cold. That's okay, rabbits shouldn't drink coffee since it can kill them.

She swallows all of it.

When she puts the mug down, she sees Shuichi on the other side of the window, waving at her. He has a small smile on his face. Himiko just nods and chews on a piece of paper filter that had slipped into her coffee. Rabbits can't smile.

As Shuichi moves to enter the café, a man in front of him suddenly draws a gun, jabbing it at Shuichi.

"You ruined Danganronpa!" the man cries. Fires.

Shuichi's blood soaks the window. People are screaming. The barista who served Himiko calls out for her to get down. Himiko doesn't even blink, just sighs and upends her mug: she'll need the caffeine for the trial.

People start grabbing her, pulling her down. She's so used to being pulled out of a hat, but a rabbit has to get in there somehow, she supposes.

 

-

 

The Danganronpa building was so underwhelming. It looked entirely too much like an office building instead of a twisted killing game. There were no shiny-toothed executives or producers running around, just office people who directed Himiko, apathetic to how she was throwing her life away.

She was seventeen when she entered that room with twelve other contestants. She was seventeen when the rest arrived. She was seventeen when she settled into that bizarre contraption that would forever alter her memory.

She was seventeen when she was last human.

 

-

 

She's twenty-eight now. She hasn't left her cage in too many years.

That's a lie. She's left. Rather, she's been permitted to leave, hauled out by a variety of hands that grasp her scruff and pass her around. Sometimes the hands belong to her guards, other times her agent that she apparently has, still others are fans that cling to her as if she's scamper into oncoming traffic if they let go.

They're absolutely correct.

But Team Danganronpa won't let that happen. There's no more seasons, no more show, no more merchandise. With two of the other final survivors gone, Himiko is all that's left.

She can tell they're disappointed. She can't blame them. A detective and an assassin are gone, left with a defective fake rabbit.

Opportunity shows itself at a meet and greet one day. Her fans always unnerved her. Most are alright, but there's a decidedly dedicated part of her fanbase that seems solely interested in her because of how underdeveloped she is. Moe, they call her. A dysfunctional mess that should never have left the factory, she thinks.

She's on break and her bodyguard has gone for a smoke. She's supposed to be in a special cage. Multiple locks, no other entrances, plenty of places to hide, plenty of toys for the little rabbit to play with. But this con is small, they didn't shell out the money for that. So she sits in an office break room, the sound of a coffee machine gurgling. The door's open, she can see the light of outside.

So she runs. A full sprint, legs kicking with everything her rusty springs can give. She barrels around corners, makes some calls. She's met fans over the years who have wanted to help her. Of course, they could just be interested in returning the lost rabbit, or keeping it for themselves, but she doesn't have time to worry about that.

Within a week, she's gone. Not dead. But gone. She doesn't know where; rabbits don't have good senses of direction, either.

But she's at a rocky beach, waves licking her feet. She's staring out the water. Is she free? No, probably not. This isn't the first time she's done this.

No, this is another hat. She hopped from one into another. But this hat isn't worn by a magician, just an older lady that really wants the rabbit out of it. So Himiko waits until the hand shows up.

As if summoned by her imaginings, a wicked smile appears in her vision, at the opening of the hat.

"Found you, little rabbit."

The hand reaches down, closes around her neck, and pulls. There's cheering from the audience as Himiko simply curls up, back in her cage, back in her hay, back in her room, and tries to be the best little rabbit she can be.

**Author's Note:**

> I really haven't been feeling the best, and I feel this piece reflects it. I dunno. Hope you all enjoyed, was an interesting exercise at least. And at least now Himiko is getting some more post-game fiction.
> 
> Anyway, comments and criticism are always appreciated.


End file.
